Rize MacOS Performance Issues

Many of you may have seen a lot performance issues in macOS starting on Thursday November 12th, 2020 and occurring intermittently as of writing this today, Saturday November 14th, 2020.  I wanted to write a short blog post and clarify what's going on.

Apple's servers are overloaded due to the Big Sur release and this has caused the ocsp.apple.com domain to be really slow or down entirely. This in turn has led to lags with Mac apps when launching and making API calls. Rize is particularly affected as it makes many API calls.

Here are two proposed solutions:

1. Pause Rize Mac app. This will stop the lags for Rize only and the issue will persist for other applications until ocsp.apple.com returns to normal.
   ‍
2. Add 0.0.0.0 ocsp.apple.com to your /etc/hosts file. This should fix the issue for all applications. I'd recommend this as a temporary solution though because Gatekeeper and other Apple security measures are generally helpful. Here's a code snippet that will help:

echo '0.0.0.0 http://ocsp.apple.com' | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

I took the second step and my computer is back to functioning normally with all my applications, including Rize, running as normal. I'm planning on reverting my /etc/hosts file next week.

Here are a few links helped us while investigating this issue:

• ‍https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/12/apple-widespread-outages-big-sur-downloads-catalina-imessage/‍
• https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/12/mac-apps-not-opening/‍
• https://twitter.com/aaronjpitty/status/1327001941038297098‍
• https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/1326990296412991489

We're planning on batching Rize API calls in the future. That would alleviate this issue should it ever occur again.

Let me know if you have any questions or if the issues persist after taking these steps. My email is macgill@rize.io. I'm sorry that you have run into this issue!